Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on improving the management and automation of data centers. As data centers have matured and advanced to support unpredictable workloads like hybrid cloud, big data, and mobile applications, the ability to manage and operate that infrastructure efficiently has grown increasingly difficult.

So
how do enterprise IT operators and planners keep their data centers
from spinning out of control despite these new requirements? How
can they leverage the best of converged systems and gain increased
automation, as well as rapid analysis for improving efficiency?

Gardner:
Aaron, let me start with you. From a high level, what’s forcing these
changes in data center management and planning and operations? What are
these big new requirements? Why is it becoming so difficult?

Carman:
It's a very interesting question that people are actually trying to
deal with. What it comes down to is that in the past, folks were dealing
with traditional types of services that were on a traditional type of
IT infrastructure.

Standard, monolithic-type data centers were designed one-off. In the past few years, with the emergence of cloud
and hybrid service delivery, as well as some of the different solutions
around convergence like converged infrastructures, the environment has
become much more dynamic and complex.

Hybrid services

So,
many organizations are trying to grapple with, and deal with, not only
the traditional silos that are in place between facilities, IT, and the
business, but also deal with how they are going to host and manage
hybrid service delivery and what impact that’s going to have on their
environment.

It’s not only about what the impact is going to be on rolling out new infrastructure solutions like converged infrastructures from multiple vendors, but how to increasingly provide more flexibility and services to their end users as digital services.

It's
become much more complex and it's a little bit harder to manage,
because there are many, separate types of tools that they use to manage
these environments, and it has continued to increase.

Gardner: Steve, do you have anything more to offer in terms of how the function of IT is changing? I suppose that with ITIL v3 and more focus on a service-delivery model, even the goal of IT has changed.

Wibrew:
That's very true. We’re seeing a trend in the change and role of IT to
the business. Previously IT was a cost center, an overhead to the
business, to deliver the required services. Nowadays, IT is very much
the business of an organization, and without IT, most organizations
simply cease to function. So IT, its availability and performance, is a
critical aspect of the success of the business.

Gardner:
What about this additional factor of big data and analysis as applied
to IT and IT infrastructure. We’re getting reams and reams of data that
needs to be used and managed. Is that part of what you’re dealing with
as well, the idea that you can be analyzing in real-time what all of
your systems are doing and then leverage that?

Wibrew: That’s certainly a very important part
of the converged-management solution. There’s been a tremendous
explosion in the amount of data, the amount of management information,
that's available. If you narrow that down to the management information
associated with operating management and supporting data centers from
the facility to the applications, to the platforms right up to the
services to the business, clearly that's a huge amount of information
that’s collected or maintained on a 24×7 basis.

Making
good and intelligent decisions on that is quite a challenge for many
organizations. Quite often, we would be saying that people still remain
in isolated silo teams without good interaction between the different
teams. It's a challenge trying to draw that information together so
businesses can make intelligent choices based on analytics of that
end-to-end information.

Gardner: Aaron, I’ve
heard that word "silo" now a few times, siloed teams, siloed
infrastructure, and also siloed management of infrastructure. Are we now
talking about perhaps a management of management capabilities? Is that
part of your story here now?

Added burden

Carman:
It is. For the most part, most organizations when faced with trying to
manage these different areas, facilities IT and service delivery, have
come up with their own set of run books, processes, tools, and
methodologies for operating their data center.

When
you put that onto an organization, it's just an added burden for them to
try to get vendors to work with one another and integrate software
tools and solutions. What the folks that provide these solutions have
started to realize is that there needs to be an interoperability between
these tools. There has never really been a single tool that could do
that, except for what has just emerged in the past few years, which is
DCIM.

Gardner:
I suppose yet another trend that we’re all grappling with these days is
the notion of things moving to as-a-service, on-demand, or even as a
cloud technology. Is that the case, too, with DCIM, that people are
looking to do this as a service? Are we starting to do this across the
hybrid model as well?

Today, clients have a huge amount of choice in terms of how they provision and obtain their IT.

Carman:
Yes. These solution providers are looking toward how they can
penetrate the market and provide services to all different sizes of
organizations. Many of them are looking to a software-as-a-service (SaaS)
model to provide DCIM. There has to be a very careful analysis of what
type of a licensing model you're going to actually use within your
environment to ensure that the type of functionality you're trying to
achieve is interoperable with existing management tools.

Gardner:
Steve, do you have anything more to offer in terms of where this is
going, perhaps over time on that services delivery question? [Learn more about DCIM.]

Wibrew:
Today, clients have a huge amount of choice in terms of how they
provision and obtain their IT. Obviously, there are the traditional
legacy environments and the converged systems and clients operate in
their own cloud solutions.

Or maybe they’re even going
out to external cloud providers and some interesting dynamics that
really do increase the complexity of where they get services from. This
needs to be baked into that converged solution around the
interoperability and interfacing between multiple systems. So IT is
truly a business supporting the organization and providing end-to-end
services.

Gardner: Well I can certainly see why
IDC recently named 2014 is the year of DCIM. It seems that the timing
now is critical. If you let your systems languish in legacy status for
too long, you won’t be able to keep up with the new demand. If you don’t
create management-of-management capabilities, you won’t be able to
cross these boundaries of service delivery and hybrid models and you
certainly won’t be able to exploit the analysis change from all the
data.

So it seems to me that this is really the time
to get on this before you lose ground and/or can’t keep up with the
modern requirements. What’s happening right now in terms of HP and how
it’s trying to help organizations obtain do some sooner rather than
later? Let me start with you, Aaron.

Organizations struggling

Carman:
Most organizations are really struggling to introduce DCIM into their
environment, since at this point, it’s really viewed as more as a
facilities-type tool. The approach from different DCIM providers varies greatly on the functions and features they provide in their tool. Many
organizations are struggling just to understand which DCIM product is
best for them and how to incorporate into a long term strategy for
operations management.

So the services that we brought
to market address that specifically, not only from which DCIM tool will
be best for their environment, but how it fits strategically into the
direction they want to take from hosting their digital services in the
future.

Gardner: Steve, I think we should also
be careful not to limit the purview of DCIM. This is not just IT. This
does include facilities, hybrid and service delivery model, management
capabilities. Maybe you could help us put the proper box around DCIM.
How far and why does it go or should we narrow it so that it doesn’t
become deluded or confused?

Wibrew: Yeah, that’s
a very good question, an important one to address. What we’ve seen is
what the analysts have predicted. Now is the time, and we’re going to
see huge growth in DCIM solutions over the next few years.

DCIM alone is not the end-to-end solution.

DCIM
has really been the domain of the facilities team, and there’s
traditionally been quite a lack of understanding of what DCIM is all
about within the IT infrastructure management team. If you talk to lot
of IT specialists, the awareness of DCIM is still quite limited at the
moment. So they certainly need to find out more about it and understand
the value that DCIM can bring to IT infrastructure management.

I
understand that features and functions do vary, and the extent of what
DCIM delivers will vary from one product to another. It’s very good
certainly around the facilities space in terms of power, cooling, and
knowing what’s out on the data center floor. It’s very good at knowing
what’s in the rack and how much power and space has been used within the
rack.

It’s very good at cable management, the
networks, and for storage and the power cabling. The trend is that DCIM
will evolve and grow more into the IT management space as well. So it’s
becoming very aware of things like server infrastructure and even down
to the virtual infrastructure, as well, getting into those domains.

DCIM
will typically have work protectabilities for change in activity
management. But DCIM alone is not the end-to-end solution, and we
realized the importance of the need to integrate it with the full ITSM
solutions and platform management solutions. A major focus, over the
past few months, is to make sure that the DCIM solutions do integrate
very well with the wider IT service-management solutions to provide that
integrated end-to-end holistic management solution across the entire
data-center ecosystem.

Gardner: Aaron, when I
hear Steve talking about this more general inclusion description of
DCIM, it occurs to me that this isn’t something you buy in a box. This
is not just a technology or a product that we’re talking about. We’re
talking about methodology. We’re talking about consulting, expertise,
and tribal knowledge that’s shared. Maybe you could help us better
understand not only HP’s approach to this, but how one attains DCIM.
What is the process by which one becomes an expert in this? [Learn more about DCIM.]

Great variation

Carman:
With DCIM being a newer solution within the industry, I want to be
very careful about calling folks DCIM specialists. We feel that we have
a very great knowledge of the solutions out there. They vary so
greatly.

It takes a collaborative team of folks within HP, as well as with the client, to truly understand what they’re trying
to achieve. You could even pull it down to what types of use cases
they’re trying to achieve for the organization, which tool works best
and in interoperability and coordination with the other tools and
processes they have.

We have a methodology framework called the Converged Management Framework
that focuses on four distinct areas for a optimized solution and
strategy for starting with business goals and understanding what the
true key performance indicators are and what dashboards are required.

It
looks at what the metrics are going to be for measuring success and
couples that with understanding organizationally who is responsible for
what types of services we provide as an ultimate service to our end
user. Most of the time, we’re focusing on the facilities in IT
organization.

Also, those need to be aligned to the
process and workflows for provisioning services to the end users,
supported directly by a system’s reference architecture, which is
primarily made up of operational management tools and software. All
those need to be supported by one another and purposefully designed, so
that you can meet and achieve the goals of the business.

IT infrastructure, right up to services of a business, end to end, is very large and very, very complex.

When
you don’t do that, the time it takes for you to deliver services to
your end user lengthens and costs money. When you have separate tools
that are not referencing single points of data, then you’re spending a
lot of time rationalizing and understanding if you have the accurate
data in front of you. All this boils down to not only cost but having a
resilient operations, knowing that when you’re looking at a particular
device or setup devices, you truly understand what it’s providing end to
end to your users.

Gardner: Steve, it seems to
me that this is a little bit of a chameleon. People who have a certain
type of requirement can look at DCIM, some of the methodologies and
framework, and get something unique or tailored.

If
someone has real serious energy issues, they’re worried about not being
able to supply sufficient energy. So they could approach DCIM from that
energy vantage point. If someone is building a new data center, they
could bring facilities planning together with other requirements and
have that larger holistic view.

Am I reading this
right? Is this sort of a chameleon or an adaptive type of affair, and
how does that sort of manifest itself in terms of how you deliver the
service?

Wibrew: If you think about the
possibilities in the management of facilities, the IT infrastructure,
right up to services of a business, end-to-end, is very large and very,
very complex. We have to break it down into small or more manageable
chunks and focus on the key priorities.

Most-important priorities

So
we look at the trans-organization, work with them to identify to them
what their most important priorities are in terms of their
converged-management solution and their journey.

It’s
heavily structured around ITSM and ITIL processes, and we’ve identified
some great candidates within ITIL for integration between facilities in
IT. It’s really a case of working out the prioritized journey for that
particular client. Probably one of the most important integrations would
be to have a single view of the truth of operational data. So it would
be unified asset information.

CMDBs
within a configuration management system might be the very first and
important integration between the two, because that’s the foundation for
other follow-on services until you know what you’ve got, it’s very
difficult to plan, what you need in the future in terms of
infrastructure.

Another important integration that is
now possible with these converged solutions is the integration of power
management in terms of energy consumption between the facilities and the
IT infrastructure.

These integrated solutions can be more granular, far more dynamic around energy consumption.

If you think about managing the power consumption of things like efficiency of the data center with PoE,
generally speaking, in the past, that would be the domain of the
facilities team. The IT infrastructure would simply be hosted in the
facility.

The IT teams didn’t really care about how
much power was used. But these integrated solutions can be more
granular, far more dynamic around energy consumption with much more
information being collected, not just at a facility level but within the
racks and in the power-distribution units (PDUs), and in the blade chassis, right down to individual service.

We
can now know what the energy consumption is. We can now incentivize the
IT teams to take responsibility for energy management and energy
consumption. This is a great way of actually reducing a client’s carbon
foot print and energy consumption within the data center through these
integrated solutions.

Gardner: Aaron, I suppose
another important point to be clear on is that, like many services
within HP Technology Services, this is not just designed for HP
products. This is an ecumenical approach to whatever is installed in
terms of product facility management capability. I wonder if you could
explain a bit more HP’s philosophy when it comes to supporting the
entire portfolio. [Learn more about DCIM.]

Carman: HP’s professional
services we’re offering in this space are really agnostic to the final
solution. We understand that a customer has been running their
environment for years and has made investments into a lot of different
operational tools over the years.

That’s a part of our
analysis and methodology, to come in and understand the environment and
what the client is trying to achieve. Then we put together a strategy, a
roadmap of different products, that will help them achieve their goals
that are interoperable.

Next level

We
continue to transform them to the next level of abilities or
capabilities that they are looking to achieve, especially around how
they provision services and help them become, at the end, most likely a
cloud-service provider to their end users, where heavy levels of
automation are built in, so that they can get digital services to their
end users in a much shorter period of time.

Gardner:
One of the things I really like in talking about technology is to focus on the way it’s being used, to show rather
than just tell. I’m hoping that either of you, Aaron or Steve, have some
use cases or examples where this has been put to good use -- DCIM
processes, methodologies, the über-holistic approach, and planning right
down to the chassis included.

I hope you can not only
discuss a little bit about by who and how this is being done, but what
they get for it. Are there any data points we can look to that tell us
that, when people do this right -- and here are some folks that have
done it right -- what they got back for their efforts. Why don’t we
start with you, Aaron?

Carman: HP has been
offering operational services for years. So this is nothing new to HP,
but traditionally, we’ve been providing these services in silos. When we
reorganized ourselves just recently and really started to put together
the IT-plus-facilities store, it quickly became very apparent that from
an operations management perspective, a lot of the services we provide
really needed to have a lifecycle approach and be brought together.

So
we have a lot of different examples. We’ve rolled out different forms
of converged-management consulting to other clients, and there are a lot
of different benefits you get from the different tools that are a part
of the overall solution.

We’re providing folks with a means of optimizing how they provision services, which is going to lower their cost structures.

You
can point to DCIM and a lot of the benefits you get from understanding
your assets and being able to decommission those more quickly,
understanding the power relationship, and then understanding many
different elements of tying the IT infrastructure chain to the
facilities chain.

In the end, when you look at all
these together, it’s going to be different for every client. You have to
come in and understand the different components that are going to make
up a return on investment (ROI) for the client based upon what they’re willing to do and what they’re trying to achieve.

In
the end, we’re providing folks with a means of optimizing how they
provision services, which is going to lower their cost structures.
Everyone is looking to lower cost, but also increase resiliency, as well
as then possibly defer large capital expenditures like expanding data
centers. So many of these different outcomes could apply to a customer
that engages with converged management.

So
this is fairly new, but Steve Wibrew, is there any instance where
you’ve worked with some organization and that some of the really
powerful benefits of doing this properly have shown through? Do you have
any anecdotes you can recall of an organization that’s done this and
maybe some interesting ways that it’s benefited them, maybe unintended
consequences?

Data-center transformation

Wibrew:
I certainly can give some real examples. Where I've worked in the past
with some major projects for transformation within the data center, we
would be deploying large amounts of new infrastructure within the data
center.

The starting point is to understand what’s
there in the first place. I’ve been engaged with many clients where if
you ask them about inventory, what’s in the data center, you get totally
different answers from different groups of people within the
organization. The IT team wants to put more stuff into the data center.
The facilities team says, “No more space. We’re full. We can’t do that.”

I
found that when you pull this data together from multiple sources and
get a consistent feel of the truth, you can start to plan far more
accurately and efficiently. Perhaps the lack of space in the data center
is because there may be infrastructure that’s sitting there, powered
on, and not being utilized by anybody.

It’s a fact that
we’re redundant. I’ve had many situations where, in pulling together a
consistent inventory, we can get rid of a lot of redundant equipment,
allowing space for major initiatives and expansion projects. So there
are some examples of the benefits of consolidated inventory and
information.

DCIM is the only tool poised to become that backbone between the facilities and IT infrastructures.

Gardner:
We’re almost out of time, but I just wanted to look towards the future
about the requirements and the dynamic nature of workloads and the scale
and density of consolidated data centers. I have to imagine that these
are only going to become more urgent and more pressing.

So what about that, Aaron, as we look a few years out at big-data requirements, hybrid cloud requirements, infrastructure KPIs
for service delivery, energy, and carbon pressures? What’s the outlook
in terms of doing this, and should we expect that there will be an
ongoing demand, but also ongoing and improving return on investments you
make, vis-à-vis these consulting services and DCIM?

Carman:
Based upon a lot of the challenges that we outlined earlier in the
program, we feel that in order to operate efficiently, this type of a
future state operational-tools architecture is going to have to be in
place, and DCIM is the only tool poised to become that backbone between
the facilities and IT infrastructures.

So
more-and-more, with a lot of the challenges of my compute footprint
shrinking and having a different requirements that I had in the past,
we’re now dealing with a storage or data explosion, where my data center
is all filled up with storage files.

As these new
demands from the business come down and force organizations onto new
types of technology infrastructure platforms they haven’t dealt within
the past, it requires them to be much more flexible when they have, in
most cases, very inflexible facilities. That’s the strength of DCIM and
what it can provide just in that one instance.

But
more-and-more, the business is expecting digital services to almost be
instant. They want to capitalize on the market at that time. They don't
want to wait weeks or months for enterprise IT to provide them with a
service to take advantage of a new service offering. So it's forcing
folks into operating differently, and that's where converged management
is poised to help these customers.

Looking to the future

Gardner:
Last word to you, Steve. When you look into your crystal ball and think
about how things will be in three to five years, what is it about DCIM rather
and some of these services that you think will be most impacting?

Wibrew:
I think the trend we're going to see is a far greater adoption of DCIM.
It's only deployed in a small number of data centers at the moment.
That's going to increase quite dramatically, and this could be a much
tighter alignment between how the facilities are run and how the IT
infrastructure is operated and supported. It could be far more
integrated than it is today.

The roles of IT are going
to change, and a lot of the work now is still around design, planning,
scripting, and orchestrating. In the future, we're going to see people,
almost like a conductor in an orchestra, overseeing the operations
within the data center through leading highly automated and optimized
processes, which are actually delivered by automated solutions.

The trend we're going to see is a far greater adoption of DCIM. It's
only deployed in a small number of data centers at the moment.

Gardner:
Very good. I should also point out that I benefited greatly in learning
more about DCIM on the HP website. There were videos, white-papers, and
blog-posts. So, there’s quite a bit of information for those interested
in learning more about DCIM. HP Technology Services website was a great
resource for me. [Learn more about DCIM.]

We'll have to leave it there,
gentlemen. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect
discussion on improving the management and automation of data centers
and facilities. We’ve seen how IT operators and planners can keep their
data centers from spinning out of control via exploiting new data-center
infrastructure management capabilities.

Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how organizations need to better manage the
impact that IT and big data now have on data centers and how Data Center Infrastructure Management helps. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights
reserved.